Foreign Minister Pham Bình Minh says Southeast Asian countries are trying to
strike a balance between competing US and Chinese interests in disputed waters
Hanoi and Beijing both claim areas of South China Sea but Vietnam insists it
wants to avoid conflict

It looked like a one-off case in late 2016 when The European Anti-Fraud
Office determined that certain organic coated steel products that originated in
China had been shipped through Vietnam to avoid anti-dumping duties.

Vietnam welcomed roughly 4.2 million Chinese visitors in the first 10 months
of this year, or 32.6 percent of the total international arrivals, posting a
year-on-year rise of 28.8 percent, the Vietnam National Administration of
Tourism said on Monday.

The detention of an American citizen in Vietnam, arrested while
participating in a protest in Ho Chi Minh City, has again drawn international
media attention to social unrest in this fast-growing nation of close to 100
million.

China has warned its citizens in Vietnam after protesters clashed with
police over a government plan to create new economic zones for foreign
investment that has fueled anti-Chinese sentiment in the country.

Human traffickers are getting more sophisticated – using high tech methods
such as mobile phones and social media accounts to target young girls in remote
mountainous areas leaving enforcements agencies with a mountain to climb to
keep the girls safe.

Police in Vietnam detained more than a dozen protesters in the capital Hanoi
on Sunday and halted demonstrations in other cities against plans for new
special economic zones that the protesters fear will be dominated by Chinese
investors.

Some oil blocks off Vietnam’s sprawling coastline fall within an area of the
South China Sea demarcated by China’s “nine-dash line,” the basis for Beijing’s
controversial claims to most of the resource-rich waterway.